Tampon selfies attempt to ease stigma, save lives
Tired of the taboo surrounding menstruation, British-based nonprofit organization Plan U.K. launched the #JustATampon campaign on Monday to start a conversation about a stigma that is endangering women’s lives.
Only 12 percent of women and girls have access to sanitary products, according to the organization, which partnered with news site VPoint to launch the campaign. Facing a lack of menstrual products and discrimination from their community, 1 in 10 girls misses school when she has her period, it added.
“Because it’s just a tampon — there’s nothing to be embarrassed about, but just a tampon can change women’s lives,” the campaigners wrote.
To confront the embarrassment, supporters of the campaign have posed for selfies with a tampon and posted them on social media to raise awareness about the lack of feminine hygiene products in low-income countries. In the U.K., some urged lawmakers to stop taxing women for buying the products. And a campaign video, “We Asked a Bunch of Men to Explain How They Think Tampons Work,” which challenges men about their knowledge on periods, aims to initiate conversations on the taboo topic.
The initiative follows recent efforts in the U.K. to raise awareness about a related issue: the lack of feminine hygiene products in homeless shelters, especially at a time when more women have become homeless. The campaign, #TheHomelessPeriod, has collected about 94,000 signatures to call on the secretary of health to provide free tampons at shelters.
In New York City, one of the largest women’s shelters reported a quintupling of the number of donations after increased awareness among donors about the issue. Care for the Homeless received more than 3,500 pads, tampons and other feminine hygiene products from private donors and organizations so far this year — more than in all of 2014.
About 59,000 people, including 3,340 single women and nearly 22,000 adults in families, are in need of shelter each night, according to the Coalition for the Homeless, a New York–based advocacy and service organization.
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